


Between One Breath and the Next

by DreamingAngelWolf



Series: In the Quiet Spaces [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Background NicoJoe really, Birthday, Canon Divergence - Post-Force Multiplied, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, Gen, Nicky being Kind and Caring, Nile might need a hug, Post-Movie, Slice of Life, Team as Family, The seemingly restorative powers of the Northern Lights
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:15:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25232236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamingAngelWolf/pseuds/DreamingAngelWolf
Summary: There’s a lot on Nile’s mind on the night of her twenty-seventh birthday, least of all the fact that she’s stood underneath one of the most breathtaking natural wonders of the world and all she wants is to be back in Chicago.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: In the Quiet Spaces [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1833574
Comments: 98
Kudos: 985





	Between One Breath and the Next

**Author's Note:**

> I was originally going to wait until after the latest issue of the comic was released to post this to try and tie that arc in whilst keeping true to the film too, but I got too impatient and just sort of skipped volume two altogether... it’s still set after the last clip of the film, though, so I guess it could be taken as a slight canon-divergence? Ah well.
> 
> Here’s a birthday, a holiday, and a deep and meaningful conversation between Nile and Nicky, featuring banter from Joe and a quick dash of Andy caring more than she lets on (plus an alluded-to cameo at the very end).

It’s eight months after Nile’s whirlwind introduction to immortality that a passing thought catches like unseen barbed wire, and not an hour after having helped dismantle a child drug mule operation - resting in the back of the car, watching the night-inked landscape whip by, Andy drafting up the invoice for their contractor next to her, Nicky and Joe talking quietly in a different language in the front - she suddenly realises it’s her birthday in two weeks. Just like that, she’s reminded of how irreversibly her life has changed. She had fully expected to spend her twenty-seventh in the desert, taking jibes about getting older from her unit, making time for a call back home (and hearing more jokes about growing old from her brother), but now? Now, Nile has no idea where she’ll be in two weeks, the three around her would probably tease her for being so young still, and there won’t be any calls to Chicago.

And her mom and brother -

“You okay?”

Blinking back to the car, Nile turns to find Andy watching her. The care is in the question - just a check-in, but one only asked when deemed necessary. They don’t coddle her so much anymore, for which she’s more than grateful, and even now Andy doesn’t look outwardly concerned. Nile wasn’t sure what tipped her off to her mini revelation. Trying to relax, she answers honestly, saying, “I just remembered it’s my birthday soon.” She leaves it at that, because what else is there to say when they all already know? When they’ve all been through so many birthdays it still barely registers to her?

“When?” Andy asks, and Nicky subtly turns an ear towards them.

She tells them, and that’s apparently conversation over - which, again, she’s glad for. Of all the discussions that could possibly be held in a battered car at god-knows-what hour in the morning in the middle of nowhere far away from anything familiar, her now-redundant birthday is not one of them. Nile turns back to the window as Nicky says something foreign-sounding, Andy and Joe responding in kind; normally that would irritate her, them talking around her in tongues she doesn’t know yet, but in that moment her thoughts have already drifted. There’s a video somewhere from her last birthday, one her high school friends sent her as a surprise, and her fingers twitch towards her phone before she remembers it’s only a burner in her pocket.

It’s a long drive after that.

When they finally reach their safe house, there’s little else Nile wants to do beyond clean up and crash. They all do, but by an unspoken agreement Nile gets to go first. It doesn’t make much of a difference in the end - she lies on the bed, listening to Andy take her turn in the shower, Joe and Nicky settling down on the sofa bed, a dog barking outside, her own heartbeat, the gasp of wind over bare earth, the laughter of her friends and squad-mates, her brother saying “Yo, is that a grey hair?”, her mom telling her, “I love you, baby.”

Nile almost wishes for those dreams of an iron coffin again.

The next few days pass dully as they wait for payment. They watch TV a lot, practise Nile’s language skills, and occasionally discuss where they might go next, which is wherever Copley finds jobs for them. Since Booker’s ‘departure’ from the team, though, it’s Nile who’s become their digital navigator. Sure, the others know how to work laptops, smart phones and tablets, and they can use the Internet perfectly adequately, but this is one area where Nile’s youth gives her an edge over them, more intuitive when it comes to looking for and learning things that aren’t immediately obvious. Joe’s not bad, and Nicky can do so too, but Andy? “You know what they say about older generations and technology,” Joe says, and simply laughs when Andy gives him a look that promises damning retribution. 

And Nile won’t lie, it’s helped her feel more like part of the team, being able to contribute to how they work and where their time goes. They value her input, ask for her opinions; which would she rather: the illegal animal traders in Peru, or the village tyrant in Rwanda? So she’s a little surprised when, two days after their payments come through, Andy hands her a plane ticket for Norway. 

“Norway?”

Joe says, “Nicky and I bought a cabin there in… was it nineteen-twenty-four?”

“No,” Nicky says from where’s he washing up after breakfast, “that was the one we stayed at in Sweden. Norway was earlier - ninety-three.”

“Right, right. We made sure it was looked after in case of emergencies.”

“Okay,” Nile says. “But, Copley hasn’t found us anything in Europe, so, why Norway?”

“Great beer!”

“Good food.”

“Peace and quiet,” Andy says.

They fly out in pairs, Nicky and Joe a day before Andy and Nile to check the state of the cabin. It’s a bit of a trek from the nearest village, all uphill in heavy snow, but when they finally reach their destination, Nile is too floored to care how tired she is. ‘Cabin’ is a horrendous understatement for the large, near-chalet-like building they’ve arrived at: dark wood walls with one made entirely of floor-to-ceiling windows, a wrap-around porch, a sloping roof topped with an almost unnaturally perfect layer of snow. There’s a fire going inside the open-plan living and dining room where Joe greets them, Nicky already underway with lunch in the stylish kitchen, and when Andy takes her upstairs to her room Nile is sure she’s been given the wrong one.

“This is way too big for just one person.” A plush double bed, a built-in closet occupying the nearest wall, huge windows overlooking the forest on the other side, an oak dressing table, a carpet so thick and soft-looking she’s torn between sinking her bare feet into it and avoiding stepping on it as much as possible.

“Really? Well I think the next smallest room is your en-suite…”

“Seriously?” Nile sticks her head through the door to look, her jaw dropping at the size of the bathtub alone, never mind the glowing, warmly-coloured tiles, the walk-in shower, the double basins and gleaming, backlit mirror. “Shut. Up.” 

And so begins an impromptu ‘vacation’ in the Norwegian mountains. It’s strangely blissful - a week of discovering new and delicious food, of stories told in front of a roaring fire, Joe trying to teach her the nuances of Norwegian beers, crash-course (literally) skiing lessons, Andy owning everyone at cards, Nicky’s endless supply of rich hot cocoa, and the most breathtaking night skies Nile has possibly ever seen, so familiar and yet so different to the ones of Afghanistan.

The Northern Lights have been visible every evening, getting impossibly more beautiful and vibrant each night until now, on Nile’s actual birthday, when it seems as though they’ve reached their peak, streaks of glossy, shimmering turquoise and green with hints of yellow and purple stretching far above, yet looking almost close enough to touch. Nile stares up at them from the back porch, and tries not to be overwhelmed; not just by the ethereal lights, and sure as hell not by the enormity of her life now, if she can help it - but simply by the events of the day. More skiing, racing each other down a nearby slope, with Joe deciding to start a snowball fight to determine who won in his and Nicky’s tie-break. Lunch at the best restaurant in the nearby town, all of them eating until they could hardly move. An afternoon of some of the most competitive card and board games Nile has ever witnessed. And then they’d brought presents out for her in the evening; nothing big, but the very fact that there were gifts at all had touched her in a way she hadn’t expected. A matching hand-knitted woollen scarf, hat and glove set from Nicky, a Shea body wash set from Joe, and from Andy, the goddamn Rodin.

She didn’t even acknowledge Nile’s refusal to accept it, damn her.

After the gifts, Andy had stepped out the front for a phone call to Copley, and Joe found an old English film playing on a random TV channel. Nile had watched it aimlessly for a bit, while Joe eschewed it in favour of sketching quietly, one arm around Nicky dozing against him. Nile found herself distracted by the motions of his pencil, and when Joe caught her staring he held up the book so she could see the cartoon doodle of a sleeping Nicky, making her laugh; and for some reason, that was the last straw. She’d calmly excused herself to come out to the back and stand under the chasms of the Northern Lights, thinking of what her family would make of all this. Back when she was a kid, the most exciting vacation they’d been on was a trip to Lake Winnebago, when her dad’s leave had coincided with the end of the school year. Nile hadn’t entertained the idea of leaving Illinois again until she joined the Marines. And now…

Now, she’s hundreds of miles away from her family on her birthday, when they’re likely mourning her, and there is nothing she can do about it. As the tears sting her eyes, Nile thinks maybe she understands Booker a little.

The door slides open behind her, and Nile wipes at her eyes. It’s Nicky, silently offering her a blanket as he joins her, and Nile shakes her head, warm enough in the hoodie she put on. “You didn’t have to do all this for me,” she tells him, the words sounding raw.

“It has been a while since any of us have had a birthday to celebrate,” he says. “We wanted to do something for you.”

“I appreciate it.” Nicky smiles at her, and Nile looks away, sniffing.

He lets a heartbeat pass before asking gently, “You miss your family, don’t you?”

Like a fucking limb. She nods, and then squeezes her eyes shut against a fresh wave of sadness, feeling a hand rest on her shoulder.

Back in the Marines, there was a rule that everyone had to adhere to in her unit: be honest with everyone, including yourself. Hiding how you were feeling didn’t help anyone, and could lead to you becoming more of a problem than if you were truthful from the start, but more importantly than that, it meant you got the help you needed sooner, whether that be medically, physically, mentally or emotionally inclined. Nile turns into Nicky’s touch - just a little - and welcomes the embrace he envelopes her in.

It’s the irony that gets her. All the way back in Chicago, her mom and brother are grieving for her when she’s still alive, thinking she’s dead when she’s going to places even the Army couldn’t have taken her; yet Nile grieves them even though she knows they’re alive because they might as well be dead to her, with the distance she’s been told to maintain from them. She can still remember the defeated hurt in Booker as he talked about his family, watching them wither and die, remnants of the people he’d loved before he changed. Not for the first time, she questions whether or not she’s done right by hers.

When she’s dampened the shoulder of Nicky’s sweater enough, she steps back, looks up at him, and asks, “Did you guys tell Booker to stay away from his family?”

“No,” Nicky admits.

Her next question comes out more sharply. “Then why me?”

With total honesty, he says, “Because we don’t want to see you suffer the same way.”

“How do you know I would?” Nile challenges. “Maybe my family are different to his.” They’d love her, no matter what - she’s sure of it.

“Almost certainly,” Nicky agrees. “But do you think Booker believed the people who loved him could ever have hated him the way they did?”

She wants to say it’s different again, but is it? Would they understand her choices if she went back? Would they believe how little she knew about any of it herself, if they even believed her at all?

“In hindsight,” Nicky continues gently, “perhaps we should have told him to stay away from them - although, at the time, if Sébastien le Livre wanted something badly enough, he would find a way to get it. None of us could have foreseen what transpired, though.”

“Why not? You were all hundreds of years old by then - Andy, thousands. How could you not have already been through, or at least seen, something like that?”

With a one-shouldered shrug, ruefully tinged, Nicky folds his arms on top of the porch railing. “Because it had been hundreds of years since Joe and I had anyone else to call family, and thousands more since Andy was even able to recall the names of hers. We never had to face them after discovering what we had become, or if we did, we do not remember. If we could have warned Sébastien…” He closes his eyes briefly, and Nile feels it, too, the weight of that tiny two-letter word. “We made many mistakes with Booker,” Nicky says, opening his eyes to look at her. “We are trying to learn from them now.”

He means it. Nicky never says anything without the utmost sincerity, she’s learned, and his words start to ease away the pain a little. “Can’t imagine he was an easy newbie,” she says, trying to bring some lightness to the moment.

“For a while, I used to make bets with Joe on how many times Andy and Booker would kill each other before the turn of the next decade.” Nile snorts, and Nicky grins before saying, more seriously, “It was not easy for him, either, but over time, he understood that we had only ever wanted to help him, and he forgave us.”

They aren’t trying to replace her family - more like, become a second one for her, there when her flesh and blood can’t be. To betray that… “What about now? Have you forgiven him?” She hasn’t asked before, partly because Booker is still the unspoken black sheep of their group, regardless of whatever has happened since his sentencing, but also partly because she still can’t begin to comprehend the complexity of it for them. Joe, particularly, had barely had a kind word for Booker those first months without him. Just because she was ready to accept an apology did not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean that they were.

But Nicky nods, brows drawn together contemplatively. “If there is one thing I have learned in a thousand years,” he says, “it’s that humanity does not come from vindictiveness or grudge-holding. We were not created out of malice, and if our creator is capable of forgiveness, made in His image as we are, why should we not also be?”

Nile smiles wryly. “You make it sound easy.”

“Ah.” His gaze wanders back to the cabin. “I know from experience it is not.”

She, in turn, looks away, back up to the shimmering heavens, and her fingers find the shape of her cross underneath the layers of clothing. She kills, she’s lying to her family, she turned her back on her sisters and brothers in Afghanistan - regardless of how they’re balancing it all out, targeting only those who prey on the innocent, to even ask for forgiveness seems outrageous sometimes. “Everything I’ve done since meeting Andy… I don’t know how I can forgive myself,” she admits, “let alone ask God to.”

“For what it’s worth,” Nicky says a beat later, “I don’t see why He would not.”

And if God would… Nile breathes in slowly, the air crisp through her nose, turning to cloud when she breathes out just as carefully. They live in a world where change can happen in the space between one breath and the next, where anything is possible - the best of the Northern Lights on her birthday, people thousands of years old and still learning, forgiveness granted when none was asked for. “Thank you.”

Behind them, the door opens, and they turn to see Joe looking out at them. “Bed?” he says to Nicky.

“Bene.” He straightens, taking up the blanket he’d brought out, and smiles at Nile once more. She knows what he’s going to say, can see that he knows that - but he’ll say it anyway, and she’ll let him, because it’s Nicky. “Get some rest, Nile.”

“I will.” And she thinks she means it.

***

Whether due to exhaustion or having a weight lifted off her shoulders, Nile wakes the next morning from the first deep, uninterrupted sleep she can remember. She dresses and heads downstairs, thoughts still flitting to her family, and is greeted by Joe, stood in the living room area frowning down at a small parcel. “Nicky and Andy went into town for some provisions,” he explains when he sees her. “This -” he holds out the parcel - “came for you.”

“What?” Sure enough, her name is on the front, the address hand-written. She takes it warily. “Should I…”

Joe’s still frowning, but it isn’t with concern. More like… disapproval. “Go ahead.”

Confused by the mixed signals, Nile opens it anyway, pulling away the packaging to find a journal inside: hand-bound, the cover a bright, traditional African pattern made of tiny beads, the cream-coloured pages thick and soft. A note flutters down, and she picks it up to read it. It’s a simple, two-line message, ending in a “Happy Birthday” and no signature, but she knows exactly who it’s from - and from the looks of things, so does Joe. Nile offers up the note to him. A few seconds pass, but he carefully takes it from her, and as he reads she watches the tension slip out of his brow. When he’s done, he nods, and hands the note back to her, leaving his hand out and asking “May I?”

They exchange the note for the journal, Nile saying, “I have no idea what I’m going to do with it. Never kept a journal before, wasn’t really my thing.”

Joe turns it over in his hands, running his fingers over the bindings and the beadwork, and flicking through the pages. “It’s beautiful, very well-made,” he comments. “Should last you a long time, however you decide to use it.”

Taking it back, she says, “Maybe we can keep score with it.”

“Score?”

“Yeah. Like, who’s won more bets, or taken the most bullets, or how many times Nicky tells us everything happens for a reason.”

He laughs. “A score-book, yeah. I like it.”

“Well, I can’t draw for shit, so…”

“Hey, a blank page is what you make of it,” Joe says offhandedly, but then his eyes drop to the note in Nile’s hand, and she picks up on what he really means. The moment passes when he looks back up, saying, “You want some breakfast? We could meet up with the others, grab some waffles in town?”

She remembers going to a waffle house for her birthday as a young girl, practically dragging her dad through the diner’s door, him making her and her brother laugh by drawing silly faces on their food in chocolate sauce and whipped cream, her mom scolding her halfheartedly for making an absolute mess of her plate. “Sounds great.”

He beams, pulling out his phone to contact the others. “You know, this could be our first score count,” he says; “Who can eat the most waffles in one sitting?”

“Oh, I’ve got all of y’all beat on that, old man.”

“Careful, kid, I wouldn’t feel right taking money from you so soon after your birthday.”

“You really think you can take me on?”

“I think you’re underestimating Andy’s proclivity for sweet things.”

“And I think you’re underestimating my stomach’s proclivity for waffle-eating contests.”

They grab their coats, still goading each other as they leave. The journal is placed carefully with the gifts from the other members of Nile’s new family, the note resting atop the cover.

_Nile - just because we keep hurting doesn’t mean we stop living. Happy Birthday._

**Author's Note:**

> If it isn’t obvious, Nicky is my unapologetic fave - he and Nile got such wonderful development for the film, and I really hope I’ve done them justice here. Heck, same for Joe and Booker, and even Andy, as much as I wasn’t quite able to include her... maybe next time!


End file.
